Out of Five

Support for those new conventions went live over the weekend. Everything’s been correctly identified so far… Excellent!

Proposing a set of conventions to help identify all the new categories: http://blog.whatiminto.com/post/31774399.

Just added Plays as an oo5 category.

Conventions

A couple of the more cultured @oo5ers have started adding theatre play reviews over the last week so I’ve added Play as a new top level category.

That’s all well and good but all these new categories have started to put a strain on my poor pidgeon-holing algorithm. It was only intended to distinguish gigs from movies and it needs a fair bit more work to deal with the more subtle difference between a gig and an album. I’ve got a few ideas for this… The first and most important revolves around a set of conventions.

Here’s what I’m proposing:

Movie
@oo5 movie 3 some opinion

Album
@oo5 album by artist 3 some opinion

Gig
@oo5 gig at venue 3 some opinion

Exhibition
@oo5 artist at gallery 3 some opinion

Play
@oo5 play at theatre 3 some opinion

Restaurant
@oo5 restaurant in place 3 some opinion

This set feel quite straight forward to me. The syntax is natural and easy to remember. I will be experimenting with them myself over the coming few weeks
to see how they work. If you’d care to join me, feel free!

Added albums and exhibitions to the official set of categories over the weekend.

Albums and exhibitions added

I added albums and exhibitions as categories over the weekend. The automatic categorisation will need a bit of tweaking but it seems to be working okay at the moment. Review away!

BackgroundRB FAIL

I love BackgroundRB for how easy it made getting started with oo5 but she’s a cruel mistress. I’m using version 0.2.0 because I couldn’t get 0.2.1 to run at all and the docs didn’t match the code so I decided it wasn’t ready enough for me yet. But. 0.2.0 has a few problems, particularly when using it as a daemon controller. I just noticed that it stopped grabbing reviews a couple of days ago, which is incredibly annoying. The logs say “Mysql::Error: MySQL server has gone away”, which I suspect is something to do with the manual cleanup I’m doing  to stop it eating all my MySQL connections. (BrB doesn’t release connections at the end of tasks so you need to kill them yourself.)

Long story short, oo5 hasn’t been grabbing reviews for a couple of days. Sorry about that. I’ll replace BackgroundRb as soon as I can work out a decent alternative.

Charts

I’m a bit conflicted about the charts. I disagree with charts generally - they’re of no value to me unless they’re personalised and having them there encourages gaming… But they help to explain the concept. So, should they be in or out? The more I think about it the more I think they should go. Hmmm.

Complete overhaul

I just pushed a big overhaul of Out of Five live. This update is all about reorganising. Almost everyone I’ve told about oo5 has had a different idea of how they might use it so I decided to reorganise the site for transparency. I’m hoping that making fewer decisions in the interface will make it more flexibile for the people who use it. With any luck, I’ve not made it all too complicated but time will tell… Let me know what you think!